Providing nonprofit executives, board members, managers, staff and volunteers with practical "how-to" strategies to help their organizations be more effective

Can an old dog (well, middle-aged dog) learn new web tricks?

August 20, 2008

It’s been interesting, as a relative techno-newbie, to work on the Third Sector New England Vlog Project with people like Steve Garfield, Deb Finn and Bethany Ramirez, folks who are in the thick of the Web and Web 2.0 (maybe 3.0!) revolution. It can be intimidating, as a person who cut her teeth in the print, pre-computer design and production days, to help to conceptualize a project that requires me to think through pre-production, “talent” prep, final production and distribution for a completely different mode information sharing.

As a communications pro, I’ve used the Web for years, of course, and helped to create several websites. But Web 2.0 combines all I know about the Web with all I know about video, audio, building lists of friends, grooming “talent” and so on and so on in a way that doesn’t always have 1+1 add up to 2!

The process of creating the vlog project itself has been very collaborative from the start. Deb Finn conceptualized it, and others have added to its development each step of the way. The purpose of the TSNE Vlog Project is to help new managers, and even seasoned execs and staff at nonprofits immersed in the work of community engagement and/or social justice, get a better handle on the language that we capacity builders (definition anyone?) take for granted.

As I used to teach in my Public Speaking 101 course years ago, always use the simplest word or phrase possible that gets your point across clearly. But sometimes the clearest word/phrase is neither short nor sweet nor simple. Sometimes, what we see as jargon may actually be the best way and shortest way to describe a concept central to the work of nonprofits.

So the TSNE Vlog Project brings experts in their field together with our Web 2.0 gurus to define some of these terms and show how central they are to our work.

During the process, however, we realized that these experts had valuable advice on “how-to” do some of the management-based work that we in the nonprofit community do daily. So, now we’ve added short videos that provide advice on everything from how to find a new ED for your nonprofit to how to conduct interviews, to what not to do when preparing for an audit.